Today, there is a concern by many individuals and organizations to protect their rights to media content that they produce from improper copying, and/or distribution. At least some of these concerns arise in part because these individuals and/or organizations are at least in part dependent upon revenue generated from their media content. Such media content may include virtually any format or form, including songs, videos, images, documents, games, books, articles, and/or other audio content, to name just a few examples of media content that some parties may wish to protect.
One class of solutions that has been implemented to attempt to address this concern is known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). Briefly, DRM is intended to provide access control technologies used by publishers, copyright holders, and others to control their media content after it is given to a consumer, from improper access, copying, and/or distribution.
However, there are a large number of these DRM solutions available and in use by various media content distributors, media player manufacturers, and so forth. Many of these DRM solutions are not interoperable, meaning at least that a consumer's device/platform may need to include multiple DRM solutions, depending upon what solution is used to protect the media content that consumer desires to access. This may require a consumer to have to manage multiple solutions. However, where the consumer's player is a hardware solution, the consumer may be constrained to a single DRM solution obtained from the hardware manufacturer. This may mean that the consumer may be unable to play content that is protected using a different DRM solution than the one implemented by the hardware manufacturer. Thus, there is a desire to address at least the issue of media content protection interoperability. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.